CRABNEBULA DIGITAL SUITE, AN ALGORITHM OF SURVEY AND 3D MODELLING FOR THE PRESERVATION AND MANAGEMENT OF URBAN HERITAGE

Abstract. Safeguarding the cultural patrimony represents one of the objectives and one of the most important challenges of our time, because only this can ensure the conservation of the documented historical memory of our civilizations. The first level of safeguarding is knowledge, that means, in some ways and in any case, to document. Indeed, documentation constitutes an indispensable support for the protection of the cultural patrimony. In recent times, the evolution of concepts and the progress of technologies have meant that the cultural and scientific debate should evolve in the examination of which type of documentation is the most suitable. Today, the need to observe city sites by entering their meanders and penetrating their reality with the aim of being able to interpret, understand and appreciate the values of the more recondite intimacies of the places, is increasingly felt. The methodological approach of this study tackles the issue of managing information that is highly interrelated, referring to the entire monumental unicum of Ortigia, by means of recognition of the parts, at times also fragmentary. With this responsibility, a suite of digital instruments, online and offline, called Crabnebula, has been conceived and already applied to a significant portion of Ortigia, with the aim of uniting various useful information towards a critical interpretation of the places: from the integrated environmental, urban and architectonic survey, to the three-dimensional rendered model.